CB550

This pretty little thing is named ‘Lucy’ and she is the 15th café racer built by Hot Sake Cycles in Orlando, Florida. We were surprised we hadn’t heard of them before, but that’s probably because ‘they’ are actually a single guy named Shannon Hulcher who builds these professional-looking bikes in his spare time. By day he works as a biology teacher who dissects frogs to show kids how the body works. By night, he dissects motorcycles to show the rest of us how to build a café racer.

“I don’t have a professional shop” says Shannon. “Lucy is a culmination of skills I’ve been developing over the years”. I wanted to build an ultra light weight bike that would be fun to ride. The whole goal was to make it as light as possible” he says. He started the build with no deadline, but then Cafemoto Orlando asked him if he could finish it for the AIM Expo. With the show only one month away, Shannon got to work.

It’s always been understood that military service steels the mind. The travel. The rigor. The honour of serving one’s country. Give them boys and they’ll give you back men. Of course, this can take years to achieve – often longer. But what happens when you find yourself back home after an extended sea-borne hiatus and realise that while you’ve matured as a person, your garage is still stuck in a very green, very crotch-rockety 2008? Why you upgrade, of course. And not to just any bike. Meet Moh and his very ship-shape CB 550 bobber.

Too often it’s the more wild creations of the custom bike scene that get all the attention. Like cheeky kids, they play the crowd and manage to get all eyes on them. Which is all good and well, unless you aren’t looking to be king of the hill and would rather travel with a certain understated style and grace. For those times, you’ll be wanting a bike that is cleaner than clean with nothing at all more than the absolute minimum required. Everything it its right place. That bike is this bike. This bike is Devin Henriques‘ Honda CB550 café racer.

Portland, Oregon is not only one of the ‘craft beer’ capitals of America, but it’s also one of the ‘craft motorcycle’ capitals as well. There seems to be so many great custom shops, motorcycles and events coming out of Portland – there must be something in the Portland water beer. One such shop that we’ve been keeping our blurry eye on is Bridge City Cycles. Started by Anthony Mautemps and his wife 2 years ago, their business is going from strength to strength. “We’ll be moving to 5,000 square foot facility in May” says Anthony. “Fortunately, the move is just across the street.” Bridge City Cycles specialize in vintage and classic motorcycles from Europe, America and of course Japan. Their latest build is this super lean and clean Honda CB550 caféracer…

To be honest, when I think of café racer culture, Canada is not one place that immediately springs to mind. Even our featured bike’s owner, Andre, admits “in Canada, café racer culture isn’t too vibrant, but I was lucky to find the one guy near Niagara that could make my dream a reality”. That guy is Adam Gaspic, from Gasser Customs, a relatively new bike workshop that has pumped out some very decent projects during its short existence. And Andres’s bike, Ravenna, is no exception.

This CB550 has been lighting up the switchboard on the SOHC4 forum for the past month. The bike was fastidiously built by a guy from Portland who goes by the forum name Paulages. Paul said on the forum that “When i originally built my CB550, the engine was simply cleaned up and painted, and all bearings and bushings replaced, etc. then, I eventually built the 718cc powerplant, and found that the rest of the bike wasn’t quite what the engine needed”.

Discovered this beautiful CB550 on the frequently updated and entertaining Motorcycle Picture of the Day blog. Completely garage built by a guy called Eric, he goes into great detail about how he created this cafe racer. Eric says he “fitted a set of forks from a 2004 GSX-R 600, using a Harley narrow glide wheel which fit surprisingly well between the calipers; it was almost a plug-n-play operation. The rotors are 320mm units from a Hayabusa which required 10mm spacers underneath the calipers. The eBay front end also came complete with clipons & controls so I decided to go ahead and use them; the right control wouldn’t fit with the bar-end mirror so I binned it in favor of a Motion Pro throttle assembly and start/kill switch from an R6. The rearsets are Tarozzi universals mounted to the passenger peg mounts. The rear wheel is a Harley 3.5×18 rim that I laced to the 550 hub with Buchanan stainless spokes. I popped the top end off the engine and freshened it up a bit with a set of 59mm pistons and camshaft from a SOHC CB650 for a little extra oomph”. Eric has really stamped his individuality on this CB550, we particularly love those Norton commando peashooter exhausts which look like they produce a mighty bark. Check out more pics of this stunning bike and the full story on MPOTD.

One of our favourite forums is the SOHC4 forum. They always have the most amazing Cafe Racers being posted by their members. Like this spectacular yellow 1976 Honda CB550 by Chris from New Jersey. He purchased the original bike for only $600 and has turned it into one of the sweetest cafe racers we have seen this year. We are definitely bias to the Benjies style of cafe racer. The tank, seat and paint job are absolutely perfect. Hit the jump to see Chris’s build pics and more details about this beast.